The Good Book

by Peter J. Gomes

  Tolbert writes, “I do not understand the pattern of male dominance reflected in the Bible as an expression of the will of God. It is rather the reflection of the culture in which Jews and Christians as well as pagans lived. I am governed rather by the insights found in various key texts which make it possible for the Christian to criticize the structures of society and the Church. These passages, Mark 10:43 and Galatians 3:28, emphasize the ideals of servanthood and mutuality in relationships rather than the ascendancy of any one person or group of persons over others.” He is of a large and growing company.

  As long as there are people willing to read the Bible in this way over and against the powers and principalities that would have them read it otherwise, such people will fight for the Bible and for the right to read themselves into it rather than to be read out of it. In the vanguard of this battle, perhaps the most significant battle for the Bible since the debates over slavery, at least in the United States, the women have led the way, and one would like to think that Lydia, Phoebe, and Priscilla would be pleased.

  Chapter 8

  The Bible and Homosexuality: The Last Prejudice

  AMONG religious people who wish to take the Bible seriously there is no more vexed topic today than that of homosexuality. The current debates recall the passion with which the topic of slavery was once debated within the context of American Christianity, but since the debate about homosexuality is very much alive and well with no immediate prospect of a moral or social consensus in sight, we have more than a historical or even anecdotal exhibition of the conflicts of values and interpretations, the hard texts and changing times we have been discussing in this section of the book. We have a contemporary, existential, deeply felt struggle that shows no sign of going away, that grows increasingly less civil, and upon which everyone has an opinion and a text upon which to base it.

  The Hottest of the Issues

  Theologians and biblical scholars have generated an enormous literature on the subject of the Bible and homosexuality, but the topic is so electric, and so much seems to be at stake, that few are willing to concede to the experts their personal conviction on this topic. Thus, perhaps more than any other social or theological issue of our day, this one engages us at our most fundamental level of existence and raises disturbing questions about our own sense of identity, of morality, and of the nature of settled truth. Now that the Cold War and the struggles against “godless communism” have receded into the background—and for the time being we have become convinced that we are likely neither to blow up our world in a nuclear holocaust, nor to destroy the environment by our immoderate use of aerosol deodorant—we can no longer be diverted from these issues of sexuality and religion, the very discussion of which violates all our conventional taboos.

  Homosexuality is one of the issues in the current culture wars. One’s position on homosexuality determines where one stands in the politically charged debates about virtue and values, and what was once called the “love that dare not speak its name” is now the topic that simply won’t be quiet. Unlike the topics of other moral debates, homosexuality is seen not only as a social practice or condition upon which good hearts and minds may differ but as an issue so central to right conduct and belief that compromise or sweet reasonableness is thought to be capitulation to error, and therefore unacceptable. Thus, the debate is almost undebatable.

  Our subject, however, is not homosexuality in general, but homosexuality and the Bible and the religious basis for the prejudice against homosexuality so often expressed by people of religious conviction. Nearly every such person who acknowledges an aversion to homosexuality does so on the basis of what he or she believes the Bible to say, and in their minds there is no doubt whatsoever about what the Bible says, and what the Bible means. The argument goes something like this: Homosexuality is an abomination, and the homosexual is a sinner. At Sodom and Gomorrah God punished the cities for the sin of homosexuality. Saint Paul and the early Christians were equally opposed to homosexuality, and homosexual practices are condemned in the New Testament church. Therefore, if we are to be faithful to the “clear teachings of scripture,” we too must condemn homosexuality; it is the last moral absolute, and we compromise it at our own peril. The sufferings and persecutions homosexuals have endured over the centuries are signs of God’s extreme displeasure with who they are and with what they do, and their behavior, as Saint Paul points out, is contrary to nature; and this then invites a terrible retribution. The AIDS epidemic is a terrible visitation, but it is the consequence, and only the latest one, of the sexual perversion of homosexuality. All of this can be summarized in the hate slogan of the notoriously homophobic Baptist preacher Fred Phelps, who pickets the funerals of gay men dead of AIDS with the sign GOD HATES FAGS. The source of that conviction and of its more subtle variations, we are told, is the Bible.

  A Climate for Prejudice

  In preparing for her novel The Drowning of Stephen Jones, based upon the true story of a young gay man tossed from a bridge to his death by a group of young gay-bashers, author Bette Greene interviewed more than four hundred young men in jail for various forms of gay-bashing. Few of the men, she noted, showed any remorse for their crimes. Few saw anything morally wrong with their crimes, and more than a few of them told her that they were justified in their opinions and in their actions by the religious traditions from which they came. Homosexuality was wrong, and against the Bible. One of those interviewed told her that the pastor of his church had said that homosexuals represented Satan and the Devil. The implication of his logic was clear: Who could possibly do wrong in destroying Satan and all of his works? The legitimization of violence against homosexuals and Jews and women and blacks, as we have seen, comes from the view that the Bible stigmatizes these people, thereby making them fair game. If the Bible expresses such a prejudice, then it certainly cannot be wrong to act on that prejudice. This, of course, is the argument every anti-Semite and racist has used with demonstrably devastating consequences, as our social history all too vividly shows.

  Although most contemporary Christians who have moral reservations about homosexuality, and who find affirmation for those reservations in the Bible, do not resort to physical violence and intimidation, they nevertheless contribute to the maintenance of a cultural environment in which less scrupulous opponents of homosexuality are given the sanction of the Bible to feed their prejudice and, in certain cases, cultural “permission” to act with violence upon those prejudices. This is the devastating theme of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s 1996 book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, published to much dismay in Germany. Goldhagen argues that it was the cultural permission of Germany’s Christian anti-Semitism, based of course upon a reading of the Bible, that allowed the nasty work of the Holocaust to be done not only by military specialists but by people whose attitudes were based upon centuries of Christian teaching. The unforgiving indictment of Goldhagen’s thesis is not reserved solely for those who were “simply following orders,” but extends now to all branches of a society whose moral obtuseness made it impossible for most of them to see anything wrong with those orders, or with their terrible consequences.

  In the case of the Bible and homosexuality in contemporary American culture, the tragic dimensions of this biblically sanctioned prejudice among the most devout and sincere people of religious conviction are all the greater because no credible case against homosexuality or homosexuals can be made from the Bible unless one chooses to read scripture in a way that simply sustains the existing prejudice against homosexuality and homosexuals. The combination of ignorance and prejudice under the guise of morality makes the religious community, and its abuse of scripture in this regard, itself morally culpable.

  A good deal of significant scholarship in recent years has been devoted to those verses in the Bible that are adduced as definitive in determining the Bible’s view of homosexuals and homosexuality. We will look at these verses in light of some of this scholarship and with
one continuing question in mind: When the Bible speaks of homosexuality, does it mean what we mean when we speak of homosexuality?

  Given the appeal to the Bible in the case against homosexuality, one would assume that the Bible has much to say on the subject. It has not. The subject of homosexuality is not mentioned in the Ten Commandments, nor in the Summary of the Law. No prophet discourses on the subject. Jesus himself makes no mention of it, and homosexuality does not appear to be of much concern to those early churches with which Saint Paul and his successors were involved. One has to look rather hard, and with a user-friendly concordance, to find any mention of homosexuality at all. This should come as no surprise, because the word homosexuality itself is an invention of the late nineteenth century and does not occur in any of the original manuscripts from which the English Bible is descended. As historian John Boswell has pointed out in his magisterial 1980 study, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: 1

  In spite of misleading English translations which may imply the contrary, the word “homosexual” does not occur in the Bible; no extant text or manuscript, Hebrew, Greek, Syrian or Aramaic, contains such a word. In fact none of these languages ever contained a word corresponding to the English “homosexual,” nor did any language have such a term before the late nineteenth century.

  Victor Paul Furnish, in his 1985 book The Moral Teaching of Paul, informs us that the term homosexuality was not coined until the latter half of the nineteenth century when it was used by a Hungarian writer commenting on the Prussian legal code. Furnish goes on to remind us that the King James Version of 1611 makes no mention of homosexuality or of any of its cognates, and that the first use of the term in an English Bible is to be found in the Revised Standard Version of 1946. More recent translations apply the word homosexuality to biblical situations that the translators assume correspond to the meaning of the word, and thus today, depending upon your translation of choice, you may or may not see homosexuality in the Bible. There is no doubt, however, that you would not have found the word in any Bible in any language before 1946. The significance of this process whereby contemporary meanings associated with the term homosexuality and its cognates are applied to biblical situations from which the contemporary understanding may well be absent is one we will discuss in reviewing the texts in question.

  What Does the Bible Say About Homosexuality?

  The traditional sets of texts from the Old and New Testaments to which people appeal in seeking the Bible’s teaching on homosexuality are these:

  1. Genesis 1–2 The Creation Story

  2. Genesis 19:1–9 Sodom and Gomorrah, with the

  parallel passages of Judges 19 and

  Ezekiel 16:4656

  3. Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 The Holiness Code

  4. Romans 1:26–27 Regarded as the most significant of

  Saint Paul’s views

  5. I Corinthians 6:9 and I Timothy 1–10 Pauline lists of vices

  As Jeffrey S. Siker2 has pointed out in the July 1994 issue of Theology Today, to argue that the creation story privileges a heterosexual view of the relations between humankind is to make one of the weakest arguments possible, the argument from silence. The Genesis story is indeed about Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,3 as the critics of homosexuality delight in admonishing. “Heterosexuality may be the dominant form of sexuality, but it does not follow that it is the only form of appropriate sexuality.” What the story does do is reflect the world experience of those human beings who wrote it. Of course they would privilege the only way available to perpetuate the race, and they would do so with the aid of their own cultural lenses.

  Despite the efforts of modern “creationists” to cast Genesis in the mold of nineteenth-century science, the authors of Genesis were intent upon answering the question “Where do we come from?” Then, as now, the only plausible answer is from the union of a man and a woman. That biological fact is attended by the cultural assumptions of the world in which the writers lived. Woman, for example, was subordinate to man. The creation story in Genesis does not pretend to be a history of anthropology or of every social relationship. It does not mention friendship, for example, and yet we do not assume that friendship is condemned or abnormal. It does not mention the single state, and yet we know that singleness is not condemned, and that in certain religious circumstances it is held in very high esteem. The creation story is not, after all, a paradigm about marriage, but rather about the establishment of human society. John Boswell describes early Christian attitudes toward marriage as a “compromise with the material world,” and for at least one half of its first thousand years, the church valued lifestyles other than family units, preferring priestly celibacy, voluntary virginity even in marriage, and monastic community life. The creation story is the basis and not the end of human diversity, and thus to regard it as excluding everything it does not mention is to place too great a burden on the text and its writers, and too little responsibility upon the intelligence of the readers, and on the varieties of human experience.

  Sodom and Gomorrah

  The story of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19:1–9 is perhaps the most famous instance in scripture where homosexuality is seen to be condemned, and from the name of the destroyed city of Sodom came the term sodomy. According to Boswell, “Throughout the Middle Ages the closest word to ‘homosexual’ in Latin or in any vernacular, was ‘sodomita.’ ” In an extensive etymological note, he points out that the term sodomy “has connoted in various times and places everything from ordinary heterosexual intercourse in an atypical position to oral sexual contact with animals. At some points in history it has referred almost exclusively to male homosexuality and at other times almost exclusively to heterosexual excess.” On the term sodomite, Victor Paul Furnish in The Moral Teaching of Paul notes, “In every instance in the King James Version where the term ‘sodomite’ is used, the reference is to male prostitutes associated with places of worship.” The sodomites in this context, he points out, are condemned not because they have sexual relations with other men, but because they serve the alien gods of the Canaanite and Babylonian fertility cults.

  We do not know what the grave wickedness of the city of Sodom was, but it was grave enough for God to send two angels to warn Abraham’s nephew Lot of impending doom. It was God’s intention to destroy the city before the arrival of the angels, and so the punishment that befell the city had to do with its previous and notorious state of wickedness and not with the menacing treatment accorded the angels while they were partaking of Lot’s hospitality. It may well be that the men of Sodom knew that their fate was sealed when they saw the arrival of Lot’s guests, and perhaps it was for that reason that they wished to “know” them, either carnally, as a further expression of their wickedness, or perhaps, if merely socially, to reassure themselves that these were not the angels of doom. The temptation here is to assume the use of “know” in this instance to be carnal knowledge, and that the wicked men of Sodom further justified their reputation for wickedness by attempting to violate the laws of hospitality with the rape of these strangers. Lot, of course, refused their demands, and in a perverse gesture of hospitality of his own, offered his daughters to the lusting mob. They wanted the strangers, not the daughters. The angels gave their protection to Lot’s household, and struck blind the Sodomites at the door. The next day Lot and his family, with the exception of his wife, who disobeyed and looked back at the city, were spared the destruction of fire and brimstone.

  The conventional wisdom is that the city of Sodom was destroyed because its inhabitants practiced homosexuality. That was its great wickedness. Even if we credit the Hebrew word “know” in the demands of the Sodomites, however—“that we might know” the strangers—in a carnal sense, we should not neglect the fact that the fate of the city was determined well before the ugly incident at Lot’s door. It was in behalf of that errand of doom, in fact, that the angels came at all. Boswell informs us that this particular form of the Hebrew verb “to know” is rar
ely used in a sexual sense. It occurs nine hundred and forty-three times in the Old Testament, and in only ten of these does it have the sense of carnal knowledge. More to the point, the passage in Genesis 19 is the only place in the Old Testament where it is generally believed to refer to homosexual relations. Sodom is referred to throughout the Old Testament as a place of wickedness and is synonymous with it, but nowhere does it state that homosexuality was the wickedness in question. Among the sins attributed to Sodom in other books of the Old Testament are pride—in the books of Ecclesiasticus and Wisdom in the Apocrypha—and in Ezekiel, in addition to pride, “Fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hands of the poor and the needy.” (Ezekiel 16:48–49) In the New Testament, Jesus himself is under the impression that Sodom was destroyed because it was a place lacking hospitality; we find him saying as much in Matthew 10:14–15, and in Luke 10:10–12.